Musical Melodyians

The Musical Melodyians are a race of musical aliens who eat music, create music, and travel through space in a cosmic quest to sustain their dying civilization and renew harmony in the universe.

They are also Arduino-based robots that can move around, flash LED lights, and synthesize musical tones. They are controlled entirely by external MIDI signals, which might seem a bit strange, but allows for them to be orchestrated and controlled by arbitrary software or hardware interfaces, such as a Lemur or a DAW.

For my role in this project, I collaborate with multimedia artist and producer Scott Tooby on an ongoing basis to add new features in the C/C++/Arduino codebase, and to continually refactor and improve the abstractions we use to control the robots.

Currently we are working on prototyping in Processing some more complex AI behaviors and a Kinect interface, such that the robots could be more easily choreographed with intent-based instructions.

In addition, I’ve done some experiments with importing and controlling the 3D models of the Melodyians in Unity.

More information on the project can be found on the Melodyian Website. The first webisode can be found here.